Henry, Makoto and Michael,

thankyou very much for taking the time to reply :)

I tried all the suggestions but still couldn't get the system to boot from
CD. I suspect this mac may be a little different (5500's are spec'd as
having built in ethernet and no modem, this is the other way round, maybe
it's a late model or european version, who knows!)

Anyway, I intend to have NetBSD as the only OS on the drive and I'm 95% of
the way there now as I managed to boot floppy via O > boot fd:0, then
install via CD and got all the way through to setting the root password and
rebooting.

Couple more questions ...

a) In the install proceedure my HD is referred to as being at WD0. Apple
Drive setup said it was type ATA Bus 0 ID 0 LUN 0. I can't figure out how to
address it to boot into the HD.

b) I'm still stuck in the terminal, should I have broken back into using the
computer screen by this point? I know the manual has the output device as
/bandit/ATY,264GT-B (this is confirmed in Apple System Profile, the
/ATY,264GT-B bit at least), is there supposed to be any difference between
setting output device in BootVars to setting in OF using the terminal? I
would have thought that if it defaulted to terminal after setting it with
one, then it would be the same for the other.

Regards

Simon Troup